Ella Budgen- BA (Hons) Fine Art
Looking for the unexpected in the everyday, Budgen’s practice is devoted to material exploration and a deep fascination with found objects. Recent works assemble items scavenged from the streets of Manchester, forming sculptural constellations that reframe the overlooked and the discarded. Connotations of grief run through her practice, though the work isn't necessarily about loss- it transcends these emotions turning them into something else. Shaped by a desire to feel safe, held, and connected to things that seem almost lost.
Collecting and salvaging are acts of preservation for Budgen—an instinctive pull to document her experience. With her archive of photographs, objects and textures she repurposes these materials, mesmerised by the traces of their past lives while allowing poetic dialogues to emerge. Her installations create spaces where these objects can be witnessed in a new light: suspended, ambient, floating, not fixed but momentarily held. An archive of the transient every day.
Her work often reveals a tension between order and chaos. Distorting the objects’ original context whilst reflecting on the instability and excess of waste culture. In a world where we are consistently confronted by environmental degradation, Budgen’s impulse to salvage becomes a small act of resistance to capitalist cycles of consumption and disposability- reasserting value, presence, and care in the remains we leave behind.
